What Was Clutched Come Evening (1)
The VTubers of Anathema Production were forever being told that their models and the people inside them left remarkably similar impressions.
Even among that crowd, second-generation Charlotte Lupus drew the remark especially often from her fellow talents: her sync rate was unusually high. Go looking for a difference and the most you could say was that her real eyes were black, unlike the avatar's. So much so that when the face behind the model came out, the company caught talk along the lines of whether they had even meant to hide the red pill.
And though it could never be stated officially, even the werewolf part was no mere roleplay…….
Put another way, Charlotte Lupus—Tsunashi Tenka—was someone who felt a particularly strong kinship with her avatar, even inside Anathema Production. The circumstances had left her little choice.
"Mmm……."
Tenka turned in a slow circle and used the camera for a mirror, studying the line of her own back. Strictly speaking, what she was looking at was the back of a 3D model rendered from her captured motion… but as I said, it hardly differed from Tenka herself, so there was no problem with that. It felt less like a motion-captured avatar copying her and more like she had simply laid a short-form app's filter over her own face.
Cute. As expected…….
Harboring an impression like that might be a little strange, admittedly. Heard in passing, wouldn't it sound as if she had come down with narcissism? But the verdict concerned nothing except the clothes the avatar had on.
A one-piece dress she would never ordinarily have dared to wear. Puffed sleeves, and a skirt that ended near the knee—wide, thick with pleats, unmistakably feminine. Whatever physics had been written into it, the fabric even fluttered along with her turn. It was one of the stage costumes for her first birthday live, the one she hadn't been able to hold last year because the 3D model wasn't finished.
"Haha. It really doesn't suit me."
She muttered it with a faintly bitter smile. Both the self standing in reality and the avatar on the screen carried a fairly androgynous air. If one insisted on comparing them, the latter was perhaps a shade more like a cute girl. From the company's side they would have needed a character a bit more likely to land than the real article, so the outcome was only natural. Boyish concept or not, they must have decided that a minimum of femininity had to be worked in. That, at least, was how Tsunashi Tenka saw it herself.
Thanks to which the character of Charlotte Lupus had managed, if nothing else, to be received as something like a dependable big sister.
"……."
Well. It would be a lie to say she hadn't wanted a slightly more feminine model. If she was having a virtual avatar made anyway, becoming a version of herself she could never be in real life would have been rather nice. But that preference aside, the president and nearly everyone else had insisted that this was Tsunashi Tenka's charm, and so the design had settled here in the end.
Tenka wasn't unaware that other people liked her this way. Even in her school days the girls had adored her so fiercely, and how many times had viewers cheered this "cool" look? …She couldn't begin to say why, but there also seemed to be a fair number of viewers of peculiar taste who, even with a character like this, still wanted feminine clothes put on her.
Of course, quite apart from her own wish to try wearing such things, Tenka knew perfectly well they would never suit her. There were, blessedly, plenty of viewers who liked even that look—but Tsunashi Tenka was convinced that, viewed objectively, it could never draw a favorable judgment.
"Here."
"…Nnh."
It was around then that something cool met her cheek. Akaba Akane was holding out a plastic bottle chilled enough that moisture had beaded thick across the surface.
"Ah, thanks."
They had been running through the dance together until a moment ago and had only just slipped into a break. Tenka took the bottle as she thanked her.
"What are you doing, standing there spacing out?"
It wasn't only the water that came across. A blunt tone arrived with it—the kind a stranger might easily take for the start of an argument. Spend even a little time around her, of course, and it was plain there was no real malice in it.
Which was probably why even Aki-senpai, averse to people as she was, had opened up and stuck to her so tightly. And why, despite those oddly sharp-looking eyes, the girls back in their school days had squealed over her for much the same reason. The person herself still seemed not to know it, but Tenka had not been the only one treated like the prince of the academy behind her back.
"Nothing. I just don't think I'll ever get used to wearing something like this, no matter how many times I put it on."
Tenka answered her childhood friend's question with a slightly sheepish smile. She didn't think it was the sort of thing she needed to lie about.
"The dress?"
"Yeah. Honestly, the two of us are pretty far from anything feminine, aren't we? Even if it's only through an avatar, it really doesn't suit me."
The kinship Tenka felt toward Akane wasn't solely because they were childhood friends who had spent their early years together. In school they had been closer to objects of admiration than to girls who simply fit in among their peers—appealing as people, certainly, but at a fair remove from what one would call a woman's charm. Because they shared that position, Tenka tended to speak her mind relatively freely with her. Not that she put up walls with anyone else; it only meant Akane was someone she could treat easily, with a little less of the gentleness she usually wore.
"Right… 'we.'"
"Hm? Well, if we're being blunt, yeah?"
They weren't merely distant from feminine clothes. They were distant from skirts altogether, and trying something like that now would only look strange. Thinking so, Tenka let out a small chuckle to herself.
Akane lifted an eyebrow a fraction and offered no particular reply… but her wearing a lukewarm face was hardly a matter of a day or two, so Tenka didn't make much of it.
"Oh, right. You don't have anything after this today, do you? I'll be practicing until around six—want to grab dinner nearby and head back together?"
"No. There's somewhere I need to stop by for a bit. Shrine business. I'll go back first."
"Yeah? Then it can't be helped."
A shame. They'd both been busy with one thing and another lately, and she had hoped they might eat together for once. Tenka scratched her cheek and muttered as much. Still, she could hardly pin down someone who had already said no. She shook the disappointment off quickly and tipped the water back.
She washed her hands clean, went forward to the hall of worship, tossed a coin into the offertory box, and paid her respects.
She held the station of a shrine miko, and yet the motions were, strangely, none too familiar. Which stood to reason. Akaba Akane had done plenty of receiving worshippers at a shrine, but the number of times she herself had gone to worship at someone else's was no different from that of the average Japanese person.
Perhaps because it was a weekday, there were not many worshippers besides her.
…No. At this density one might even have to call it many. Unless a shrine was popular, there were plenty of places where a single visitor in a day was a coin toss. Speaking as someone who ran a shrine alongside a VTuber career, this too was a red ocean on the level of the VTuber industry. It was only because they enshrined Mary here, and the place doubled as a standing Anathema collaboration café and goods shop, that there were this many people even before the workday had ended.
"Oh—isn't that the miko lady?"
The words came from behind her, and Akane turned her head on reflex. She wasn't even in miko robes, nor was she working as this shrine's miko just now, so it occurred to her a beat late that they might not have meant her… For better or worse, though, the speaker was standing nearby and looking at her as if they had.
Cerberus?
That was the word that flashed through her head. Realizing it was a mistake, of course, took only an instant.
It was a bear with two heads. Not three, and not of the dog family either, so Cerberus was plainly the wrong word.
Akane remembered that figure. A yokai that had lived by gnawing, together with the other evil spirits, on the god originally enshrined here—then, the instant an Apostle appeared, had switched sides and helped put those same spirits down. Say what one would about the rest of it, its talent for landing on its feet was extraordinary. That impression had lodged deep. Akane had been with them at the time, and afterward she had helped with the work of Mary Shrine for a while as a temporary miko, so they had met face to face more than once.
As for why she had mistaken the heads for three: a plump little fox kit had been wedged between the two of them. It was the fox they had left in this shrine's care while Takaku Shrine, where it originally lived, was under repair; it had grown attached and stayed on ever since. Cute enough that photos of it now went up often on social media, it was Mary Shrine's mascot in both name and fact.
The fox sprang up and settled into Akane's arms.
…Whether the worshippers had been tossing it this and that to eat, it felt considerably heavier than before. The way it had gone a little round was cute, though.
"No—more than that, it's grown another tail."
It had definitely been an ordinary fox, nothing to do with anomalies. A moment later Akane found the two fluffy, forked tails, and her eyes opened a little wider.
"What's so special about an anomaly? Even someone living on the surface becomes one if they happen to learn magic. Foxes, traditionally, have been taken for especially numinous beings—or ominous ones."
"…Fair enough."
It wasn't wrong. Akane accepted it and nodded.
"But what's the miko lady doing here? I haven't heard anything about new goods coming in lately, or any special event being planned."
"Well, just… I had a little thinking to do."
She simply hadn't wanted to go straight home. Akane put on a lukewarm look and quietly let her gaze slide away.
"Hm? What. What's going on. The wisest bear in the world will hear you out. Me, yeah? Back in the day I even gave advice to that Don Simeon!"
"You've got the eyes of someone who thinks this looks entertaining."
"Aww, what's with the harsh talk. I'm doing this entirely out of goodwill."
"……."
The look was so plainly one of piqued interest that Akane's eyes only grew sharper. Still, it was also true that an emotional trouble didn't resolve itself just by being kept inside. It might be better to tell someone else and shake it clean off. Setting aside whether the counsel would mean anything, the mere fact of having spoken tended to ease a person's heart a little.
Akane let out a small sigh, then—telling them it was nothing, so they ought to let it wash right past—slowly began to speak.
"So……."
When the whole of it was done, the bear nodded its two heads in turn, as if it understood.
"Your playboy childhood friend, the one who runs around charming every girl in sight, is the one person who won't look at you as a woman—and that's got you all stirred up. That it?"
"No, what the fuck. How does a summary come out like that."